


Visting Hours

by minkmix



Category: Supernatural
Genre: teen!chesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 01:30:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16734468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minkmix/pseuds/minkmix
Summary: This one goes out to quirkies! ♥ Feel better dude!She requested:"Hospital/convalescence? John and his spawn? Sammy science project?The boys are the same height? Dean lets out his closet geek?Who gets the TV remote? Boys go to Salem, MA? Alec exists. :)"I couldn't pick one so I went for all of 'em at once.The 'Alec' part was a little problematic but I totally went there. XD-Mink





	Visting Hours

The view from the top floor of the hospital was pretty decent.

John figured it was a consolation considering he was the one that had been obliged to stare at it all week. He could think of worse chairs to park in for such lengthy amounts of time. It was large and even folded out almost flat when he felt like dozing. The thing was more pleasant than the bed he had at home. Besides, it was hard to avoid having a view all the way up here with the season’s shift towards winter making all the tree tops a bit more remarkable. There was nothing like entire days of sitting around to force a guy to stop and admire the brilliant demise of the foliage. Someone on the staff had hung black paper silhouettes of broomstick riding witches to festively obscure the broad wall of windows. The city’s grisly claim to fame brought on a weird civic pride when it got near the end of October. For all its history it was one of the safest places they’d staked a claim to that wasn’t out in the middle of farm country.

It might have been the most tourist infested too. The town’s economy was booming on the fame of its merciless puritanical forefathers.

He wasn’t sure how the murder of alleged followers of Wicca translated into consumer dollars but regardless of its past, it was a polite place to live. It was good to settle in a spot long enough for Sammy to start his junior year of high school and there wasn’t a lot of bullshit around for his other kid to get distracted by. John looked at the Halloween decorations again and yawned from a tired that came from long endless days of nothing at all. This charming burb with its well-lit commercial apothecaries and guided haunted tours had as many real phantoms as Disney World had mice.

His kid shifted around restlessly in the partitioned bed beside him.

Although watching Dean sleep for days had been as thrilling as expected, the strong medication had been a good alternative to being fully conscious for the majority of his captivity. John himself was going a little out of his mind with the fluorescent lights, shiny tile and rotation of strangers demanding blood samples, vascular pressure readings and hourly temperatures. He surmised that his oldest was probably contemplating making an exit by the eighth floor window by now.

Dean’s voice was strained and unused.

“When can I get the hell outta here?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

John settled back in the teal pleather recliner and shook out the newspaper on his lap. The World Weekly News had been fit inside a more respectable national publication in case any nurse mistakenly believed he might care about a pop star’s losing battle with wine coolers. Just because he had plenty of time on his hands didn’t mean he couldn’t get some work done. He gave a small begrudging smile to the startling article on its colorful cover.

It seemed the Scientologists were building a secret tunnel to the center of the Earth. Flipping a page, he wondered why anyone needed a library card to get their hands on gloriously ill contrived creative writing. All an individual lacking entertainment required was some spare change and a local convenience store.

“Can we leave, please?” Dean had tried every angle but outright begging was the latest. “Why can’t we just _leave?_ ”

He couldn’t exactly blame the kid for voicing some complaint. People had been dropping the word ‘soon’ for about a week and John wasn’t even trying to put any enthusiasm behind his own assurances anymore. This place might have been first rate but it took time to get anything accomplished. A doctor’s approval for solid foods took about a day to come full circle through the proficient yet agonizingly slow hospital bureaucracy. John had finally given up and let Sam smuggle a sandwich past the nurse’s station before Dean ate his pillow. He couldn’t even begin to guess when the hell the release forms would appear so his son could begin to replicate his aggressive non-activity elsewhere. His boy could lie around doing jack shit just as effectively in the more conducive environment of their living room. He could even bitch and moan in his very own clothes. Dean had already made elaborate plans on how he was going to burn the untamable hospital gown.

“Won’t be much longer.” John said. “I bet those lab guys are union.”

He personally thought the fifth goddamn CAT scan was a very sweet and caring gesture on the part of the medical staff but even he could see his kid wasn’t brain damaged by now. However, he had to admit that he’d been slightly concerned about the whole permanent injury thing during the first deluge of the finest pharmaceutical pain killers. When Dean had been coherent at all he had been slightly cross eyed and concerned about some chickens they didn’t own. John could live nicely for another 100 years before ever witnessing that drugged lost confusion in his child’s eyes again.

His attention refocused on the newspaper.

The next two sections were nothing but one government conspiracy after another. John knew what the real ghost stories were in the modern American mythos. The unreal that the public enjoyed to privately spook themselves wasn’t about the creak on the stairs or the shadows in the basement. These days the scares came from much more practical and believable threats. For a self proclaimed self evolved country, John didn’t see much difference in the nature of a witch hunt except the absence of witches themselves.

“You should go home dad.” Dean mumbled for the thousandth time.

“You kiddin’?” John said. “Got ten sports channels here.”

His kid writhed in the confining bed and stared at the silent television hanging overhead.

John looked up again when Dean inadvertently yanked his IV hard enough to make it move across the floor. Satisfied that the needle was still taped neatly in place, he tried to concentrate on the fine print in his hands. Dean was putting away all the lime jello they could make so he didn’t really get the pressing need for three intravenous bags of crap. John had never minded seeing his boys take a few hits but the dark bruises forming from the steady replacement of IV needles was starting to make him angry. Every time a nurse cheerfully arrived to perform the task he forced a smile and a nod despite his buzzing frustration. Being tethered to a rolling coat rack didn’t make going to the bathroom a breeze either.

John sighed at the fresh plaster cast that reached all the way up to Dean’s knee.

That and the fact that his kid couldn’t walk.

“Found one!”

Sam appeared triumphantly in the doorway. The room’s one and only TV remote had stopped working and John had gladly delegated the chore of going through the tedious lengths of replacing it. The harried staff were hard to get a hold of for the basics so John assumed he wouldn’t see Sam again until well after the plastic dinner tray had been cleared.

“It’s from another room.” Sam held up the small device.

John frowned.

“The guy didn’t need it.” He hurriedly explained. “He’s in a coma.”

He knew he should have probably said something but it was difficult to argue in the face of sound logic. Sam inspected the dinner tray before deciding that the left over cup of melted ice cream was good as new. As he dragged up an extra chair to sit down and eat it, John didn’t miss the flash of guilt when his troubled gaze fell on his brother. He knew he should say something about that too. There were almost certainly words that could assuage the heavy weight of responsibility his youngest was feeling about the current situation.

It wasn’t Sam’s fault.

Not entirely.

John found it slightly ironic that a city so synonymous with magic had been the location for his youngest son’s first science fair. He recalled the school event from his own childhood as being a gymnasium filled with potato’s made from clocks and baking soda driven volcanoes. Things sure had changed in the field of high school sciences.

At least he never remembered any of his classmates attempting to build the ultimate streetluge.

Careening down the town's steepest paved decline on a piece of particle board separated from the asphalt by four rubber skate wheels wasn't something that any teacher of his would have gone handing a trophy over for. Nonetheless, one grand tradition of science fair projects seemed to have been sustained throughout the decades. There was always some member of your family that ended up doing most of the work for you. Dean’s useless smock allowed many hours to ponder the gruesome road rash that jeans and a T-shirt hadn’t provided much protection against during his abrupt deceleration.

Dean seemed to be thinking of the tragic test drive that lead to his incarceration too.

“I still think all it needed was a little more counter balance up front—“

“Dean.” He warned.

John shut his eyes until the throb of his dull and steady headache subsided.

“Damn it.” Dean hissed.

“What’s the problem?”

“I hafta go to the bathroom again.”

Dean looked resentfully at the bags of fluid that were sneaking into his system 24 hours a day without his consent. John took a deep breath and got ready for the complicated process. Getting the boy out of bed and over a toilet without breaking any more of his bones had become an hourly occurrence he was now an expert at.

“I got ‘em.” Sam volunteered.

John paused in his seat. Sammy’s intentions were all well and good but even though his kids were the same height Dean still had a few pounds on his not so little brother. He was about to tell Sam to sit this one out but Dean’s need for the bathroom superseded any worry that his brother might drop him and his fractured ankle onto the floor.

He watched uneasily as Sam hauled Dean to one foot and kept him there while supplying the crutches. Before John could remind him, Sam grabbed the IV stand and carefully navigated his brother and all his attachments across the floor. The trip to the head and back was as trouble free and efficient as if John had supervised the procedure himself. He tried not to let his semi-fascination show as the holy remote was handed over without one demand on which network it should access. The unnerving harmonious interaction of his spawn was enough to make the next upcoming year of multifarious insurance fraud almost worth it.

John flipped out the paper and went back to work.

His laugh was out before he could stop himself.

“What?” Dean gave up trying to conceal his partial nudity and let his free leg sprawl as it may. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothin’.”

“You find something?” Sam asked.

“Nah.”

The aerial shots of gray cinder block buildings out in the wilderness wasn’t the most ridiculous sight he’d come to expect from a sensation rag like this one, but the headline was a keeper. From the massive size and layout the structures could have been just about any prison that sat outside the city limits for the comfort of its residents. There were plenty of notions out there about the government and what it did behind closed doors. He shook his head with a smile at the page with the mysterious fuzzy photographs. The caption read: _Gillette, Wyoming._

He was willing to buy a lot of crap but some things stayed firmly in the realm of science’s fairs and fiction.

Genetically enhanced super soldiers were right at the top of the list.


End file.
